Sunday, January 21, 2007

January 21 Final Udate

I woke up last night, turned on the light and looked around the bed to see where Danny Boy was. The Vorlon Wife was on the left; Danny was in the center at the bed’s head’s keeping his little head on a little pillow.

I hought the hair I was feeling in my sleep was her. It was him not her.

New/Old Cancer treatment

Someone sent me this link and it sounds good.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.
It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.
Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up
vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).
Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to
survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:
they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumors.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.

Sunday, January 7, 2007

Januuary 7 Final Update

I did not do too badly today. Although I still get pretty tired by bedtime.

We’re starting to teach the Vorlon dog some bad habits. Even though we put any table food in his bowl, he has already smelled it cooking. Now he’s starting to growl for some people food when we are eating. From now on he only gets dog food.

The Brother-In-Law stopped by today and the dog seemed to accept him fine. The formula seems to be to muzzle him until he settles down. I think he really wants to be friendly. He’s just a bit scarred.

I was looking for slippers for Danny when it snows and come across this web site.

Saturday, January 6, 2007

January 06 Final Updata

I felt considerably better today. About shortly after lunch the Vorlon wife’s childhood friend and her niece and husband stopped by. As soon as they showed up she put the muzzle on the Vorlon dog. Danny Boy settled pretty quickly. With the muzzle on they took him for a walk. Upon return, they took off his muzzle. Shortly after that he visited everyone's lap voiced his approval of their belly rub efforts